Isolated chirps become chorus as birds flock to Connecticut

Migration's full flush

Published 11:31 pm, Friday, May 16, 2014

Angela Dimmitt has been waking up to the full spring chorus during the last few weeks -- the time just before sunrise when birds go into full song, all together.

There's been lots of birds singing. When Dimmitt -- one of the most knowledgeable birders in the area -- walked into her New Milford yard on those morning, she was seeing a lot of birds to go with the songs.

But no prelude quite prepared her for her walk around Sunny Valley Farm in New Milford on May 10 -- especially when she went up into the small, wooded mountain that's part of the farm.

"The trees were just full of birds," she said. "The place was alive."

After four hours, she walked away from Sunny Valley having counted 78 species of birds -- twice as many as she might normally see.

"It has been a great year," Dimmitt said.

Nor was this simply a lucky day at Sunny Valley -- what birders call a fallout. That occurs when a storm sweeps up birds and blows them along, dropping them down in one spot, where they sit and catch their breath a bit before heading off.

Instead, it's been a remarkable two- to three-week sustained sweep of warblers coming into the state.

"One morning in my yard, I had a Cape May warbler, a bay-breasted warbler and a Blackburnian warbler," said Patrick Comins, director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut.

"It's been a really good year in the state for Tennessee warblers as well."

Connecticut is a good place to see spring warblers anyway. It's on the north-south coastal route that migrating birds follow, and it has enough varied habitat -- coastline, wetlands, woods, ponds and rivers -- to shelter a variety of species.

"I'm seeing warblers in numbers and in places I've never seen them before," he said. "I've seen scarlet tanagers perching on the branches of bushes. They're usually in the woods.

"We've seen lots of birds in apple trees, in orchards where the trees are just starting the blossom," Bull added.

Comins thinks one reason for the good year was something that happened in 2013: an outbreak of spruce budworms in the northern spruce forests, where some warblers spend the summer.

With lots of worms, the birds were healthy, with lots of hatchlings. We're reaping the benefits now.

Bull thinks the abundant birds may also be due to the weather. With cold gripping the state until the very end of March, then yielding only gradually in April, we had a late spring.

Warblers come through Connecticut as the trees start to leaf out. Their yellow plumage acts as a camouflage as they flit around the early green-gold spring foliage.

Because of the cold, the trees were a week or two behind. Birds may have been slowed down because of that -- bottled up, farther south.

Once the weather warmed, the trees began to bud, and winds started blowing up from the south, the warblers gathered in force, Bull said.

Add this to the dramatic irruption of snowy owls this winter -- when those regal white birds of the northern tundra began showing up at golf courses and on lawns -- and 2014 may go down as something special for birders in Connecticut.